Rajgir (Bihar): Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday repeated his “surrender” jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which had recently evoked outrage from the BJP.
The Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha used the expression at a ‘Samvidhan Suraksha Sammelan’ (symposium for protecting the Constitution) in Bihar, days after he had accused Modi of capitulation before US President Donald Trump.
“Trump has said at least 11 times that he compelled Modi to surrender. Our PM is not able to even whimper in protest. The reason is, what Trump has said, is the reality,” Gandhi said at Rajgir in Nalanda district.
Notably, Gandhi had claimed in Bhopal earlier this week that at the height of military conflict with Pakistan, Modi was told by Trump, “Narendra, surrender”.
The remark had left the BJP peeved, with the party’s national president Jagat Prakash Nadda calling it “treason” and spokesman Sudhanshu Trivedi alleging that the utterance was far more offensive than what terrorists like Hafiz Saeed could have said about India.
However, in his address at Rajgir, the former Congress president maintained: “I have been fighting the RSS and they surrender too easily. It does not take them long to write mercy petitions. Of course, modern technology may have led to replacement of pen and paper with WhatsApp”.
The allusion was to clemency petitions written to the British Raj by RSS ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, while he was lodged at the cellular jail in Andaman.
The Congress leader said the alleged propensity to surrender was at work when Modi, a former RSS pracharak, gave in to the demand for a caste census.
“I had told Modi, staring at him in the eye on the floor of the Parliament, that we will compel his government to hold a caste census,” claimed Gandhi.
But, the BJP will not allow a real caste census as it will finish their politics, he alleged.
“Just look at how Modi calls himself an OBC and also claims there is no caste,” Gandhi claimed.
He also said there are two models of caste census.
“One is that of the BJP, in which all is decided behind closed doors by bureaucrats, among whom there would hardly be anyone from the deprived castes.
“The other model is that of (Congress-ruled) Telangana where Dalits’ organisations and leaders are taken on board and participants in the survey freely air their experiences about things like untouchability,” said Gandhi.
